Hardware-accelerated address-event processing for high-speed visual object recognition

This paper presents a hardware implementation for high-speed, event-based data processing. A full-custom Address-Event (AER) processing system (GAEP) features a 10ns-resolution 33M/5.125M events·s^-1 peak/sustained event rate sensor data interface for precision time-stamping of asynchronous sensor data and implements hardware-accelerated event pre-processing including rate dependent IRQ generation and address masking for ROI/RONI. The pre-processing functions are implemented in dedicated hardware and operate without loading the actual processor device, a SPARC-compatible general-purpose micro-processor. The complete SoC is implemented in 0.18μm standard CMOS technology. We present a camera system comprising the AER processor and a bio-inspired dynamic vision sensor in an exemplary high-speed vision application related to shape detection / object recognition. Relevant details of the system architecture and performance results characterizing the vision system in a real-world machine vision application are presented.